Whatever compliance the federal government can demand, provided it problematizes private industry and hurts profit margin, is noble and “fair” and good.

If you can’t redistribute wealth directly, you collect it at the federal level and then redistribute it.  Mostly to key donors, bundlers, and important union bosses and their respective industries.

That may not be precisely socialism, but what it is, precisely, is liberal fascism.  And that’s because liberal fascism is always the stopping point on the way to a socialist Utopian paradise.

Some pigs being more equal than others and all.  CNS News:

The Department of Interior (DOI) is requiring private oil companies to hire marine mammal and sea turtle monitors if the companies are granted a lease to drill offshore. A marine mammal observer’s job is to watch for whales, dolphins, and similar sea creatures and to advise on minimizing the underwater noise created by offshore drilling, which can affect the sea mammals.

The DOI announced in a press release last week that it will open up 20 million acres in the Western Gulf of Mexico for an oil and gas lease sale to be held Nov. 28, which is part of the administration’s “Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2012–2017 (Five Year Program).”

The terms of the sale, which were finalized by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), include several environmental safeguards.

“These terms include measures to protect the environment, such as stipulations requiring that operators protect biologically sensitive features and provide trained observers to monitor marine mammals and sea turtles to ensure compliance and restrict operations when conditions warrant,” the release said.

[…]

The Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Outer Continental Shelf, released by BOEM in July 2012, however, stipulates what oil companies must do in that region.

It states, among other things, that the lessee and its operators must: “observe for marine mammals and sea turtles while on vessels, reduce vessel speed to 10 knots or less when assemblages of cetaceans are observed, and maintain a distance of 90 meters or greater from whales, and a distance of 45 meters or greater from small cetaceans and sea turtles.”

Companies must also “identify important habitats,” “immediately report all sightings and locations of injured or dead protected species,” and must notify BOEM within 24 hours if an injury or death was “caused by a collision with the lessee’s vessel.”

The project is being billed as part of President Barack Obama’s “all-of-the-above energy strategy.”

“The President’s commitment to a comprehensive, all-of-the-above energy strategy is creating jobs here at home while reducing our dependence on foreign oil,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “Exploration and development of our Western Gulf’s vital energy resources will continue to help power our nation and drive our economy.”

Actually, the President’s commitment to molesting private industry to appease his environmentalist constituency — which, let’s be honest, is less about protecting the planet than it is about ridding it of human footprints, humans being noxious CO2 belching rapers of pristine resources that are presumptuously stolen from rock formations or ocean beds or quarries, etc. — might be creating jobs for credentialed turtle watchers, but it’s killing jobs for many more who work in the oil and gas and energy industries.

And this is because Obama doesn’t trust private industry. It all must be monitored, deeply regulated, and largely constrained — and this must be done by people with the proper academic breeding.  This is a faculty lounge presidency run by elitist know-nothings who have somehow convinced themselves that they can micromanage the almost infinite machinations of a free market economy.

Predictably, that only serves to expose how much they don’t know and how much they can’t control — while illustrating that what they do control is harmed by their efforts to control it.

And yet this is an ideology they sustain, even in the face of history’s many recordings of its failure, and they profit from doing so, both financially and by way of an outsized acquisition of power.

Nice work if you can get it.